The Flopper halted and turned himself about, while his left hand swept
his livid face, brushing from it the spurting drops, sweeping back the
damp, tangled hair from his eyes--faced them till they saw an agony on
human countenance that struck, stabbing, to their souls--faced them
while his eyes traversed the long, long line of ghastly white faces
before him, out of which eyes everywhere, row on row of them, straining,
fixed, fascinated, seemed to burn like living fires as they held him in
their focus.

He had not gone far, perhaps ten yards--no more. By the group around the
wheel-chair, almost in the center of the line, stood Madison, his chin
in his hand in a meditative, thoughtful attitude, the single soul who
watched the scene from under lowered lids; Thornton had involuntarily
edged a little forward from behind the chair until he stood now at its
side in a strange, abashed way as though his own personality were
over-ruled, obliterated, his face with a white sternness upon it, his
eyes, like all other eyes, agleam with an unnatural fire; Mrs. Thornton
had pulled herself forward in the chair, one hand clutching at her
breast, the frail fingers of the other woven in a grasp so tight around
the arm of the chair that the flesh was bloodless; a little way off, a
group of three, the two salesmen and the metropolitan newspaper man,
seemed as though stricken into stone, stripped of all assurance, all
complacence, awed, tense, palpitant, as the patched, bare-legged
tatterdemalion of ten from the fields, that stood beside them, was awed
and tense and palpitant.

And away on either side stretched the line of white, rigid faces, the
never-ending, burning eyes--but the silence with that shriek was gone
now, for another woman and another, overwrought, needing but that sudden